The Great New Years Software Hunt

The nice thing about computers is that they give me the capability to do really complex jobs without a lot of undue effort. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes I need to go looking for the appropriate software to do what I need to do.

Over the last couple of months I have been contemplating a couple of projects. One of them is really simple and the other one is a little on the complex side.

The first thing I wanted to do is music related. The bowling center that I work for has a medium sized collection of music CD's that are played over the PA system during open play bowling. However, the problem is that most of what they have to play is what I refer to as young 'un music. In other words, a lot of Rap, Hip-Hip, Dance, and other miscellaneous crap. Lot's of drum beat, lots of base, and heavy on the Ebonics.

That's just great for a lot of the young kids that we have working the front counter, and that kind of music is a big hit during the weekend and during our Monday and Tuesday night events, but it doesn't do a lot for the older crowd that we have coming in the rest of the time. So, I decided to do something about it.

I have a collection of some two thousand plus Classic Rock MP3 and WMA files, all of which have been ripped from CD's that I either own or have borrowed. I maintain the collection for my own listening pleasure and every CD that I have recorded in this fashion that I do not own is one that I have every intention of going out and buying sometime in the future.

So, with this vast array of Rock 'N Roll music at my disposal I decided to make an MP3 CD for the bowling alley so that we would have something to break the sheer monotony that is Ebonics. I made up a CD and took it to work and it's been played rather a lot. Those old-fashioned Rock 'N Rollers that we get in the center are pleased that we finally have something on hand that they can actually enjoy. But the CD has been played rather a lot and I decided that it was time to take in a new one.

The problem is that a lot of the songs that I want to use on this one are in WMA format. The CD player at work will understand MP3 files just fine but it doesn't understand WMA, so I need to convert. Rather than try to download something I decided to look around my own hard drive and see if I had something handy that would do the job. Sure enough a program called Sound Stream, which is part of the Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum package that I have installed on my machine, has the ability I need. So I fired it up, told it where the files were, told it where I wanted the converted files copied to, and turned it loose. When I woke up eight hours later the operation was completed. I fired up my copy of MusicMatch Jukebox and had a listen.

I'm not all that happy with the results. The files are all intact, but the MP3 copies have odd distortions and rattles throughout the song. It makes listening to them something of a chore at times. Unfortunately it also means that when I go to create that new MP3 CD I won't be able to use these files like I wanted to because those rattles and distortions will be burned onto the CD and the crowd will be able to hear them when I play the CD at work.

What I need to accomplish this one task is a program that will reliably convert WMA files to MP3 format. I imagine I'll be able to find a freeware offering somewhere that will do the trick, I just need to have a look around. Of course, any suggestions on what I can use to accomplish this chore would be appreciated.

The other project that I'm working on is a short story collection which I am intending to self publish.

The collection is about halfway done, and will be completed just as soon as I finish up a couple more stories to add to the project. At the moment it runs about fifty thousand words and a hundred some odd pages.

When I write fiction, I use MS Word as my word processor of choice. Currently I am using Word 2002, which is part of the Office XP package. There isn't a lot of difference between Word 2000 and Word 2002, but what keeps me using Word 2002 is a tiny little bit of convenience. Microsoft made a new toolbar which has a single button and a text box beside it. When you press the button a count of the number of words in your project appears in the text box. You can see where this would come in handy for a writer, and this little feature has saved my ass on a couple of occasions.

Office 2000 had another useful little program called Microsoft Binder, which served as a container for other MS Office files. The nice thing about the Binder is that you could change the order of the files in the project just by clicking and dragging, which makes it really easy to edit projects involving more than one file. Given that each of the stories I'm adding to the short story collection is in its own separate file the Binder also becomes very useful for managing my collection.

The problem is that the Binder no longer appears in Office XP. Microsoft decided that no one was using it and took it out of the package. The online support documentation for MS Office says that you can install Binder by itself from a previous version of Office and it will work fine with Office XP, and that's what I've done for the sake of my project, but it's a pain in the ass. Binder is one of the few programs in the MS Office suite that's actually a reasonable size and it's a useful piece of software. I'd like to find the genius that removed it from the suite and introduce him to one of the pinsetters at work, face first.

Installing Binder from Office 2000 has solved my problem for the time being, but it's something of a pain in the ass to have to do that every time I perform a Format and Restore operation on my computer. So I am looking for a third party program, preferably freeware or really really really cheap, that does the same thing that Binder does. Anyone have any ideas?